


The Rich Earth Between Us

by Ellerigby13



Series: Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 [5]
Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: 1990s, Alternate Universe - 1940s, F/F, First Love, Growing Up, Homophobia, Love Letters, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Pop Culture, Racism, Sexual Harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:42:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26288932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellerigby13/pseuds/Ellerigby13
Summary: Monica is seven years old when she and her momma move into the grand white house on the edge of New Orleans.She finds a blue-eyed ragdoll and a mysterious jewelry box left over from the last owners of the house, and has no idea how the secrets inside will change her, comfort her, and show her the love that's hiding right beneath her nose.
Relationships: Carol Danvers & Maria Rambeau & Monica Rambeau, Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau, Darcy Lewis/Ava Starr, Maria Rambeau & Monica Rambeau
Series: Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851811
Comments: 17
Kudos: 29
Collections: Darcy Lewis Bingo





	The Rich Earth Between Us

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes the perspective of a Black girl with an LGBTQ+ mother. It mentions racial tensions relevant to the 1990s, period-typical homophobia and slurs, and contains one instance of sexual harassment of a non-Black man against a Black woman which may be triggering to some readers. While I myself am a non-Black queer woman of color, I hope that my writing in this perspective does not take away from the voices and struggles of BIPOC in a country which has set them up to fail.
> 
> Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ people and experiences are valid, and we must divest from communities which aim to further disenfranchise our brothers and sisters who have faced grievous injustice for far too long, and invest in solutions toward a more equitable future for all.
> 
> [Find a way that you can help support a future that protects everyone's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.](https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/)

The Rich Earth Between Us

 _We shall sit here, softly_ _  
_ _Between two different years._ _  
_ _And the rich earth between us_  
_Shall drink our tears._ _  
_ -Audre Lorde

1.

Monica is seven years old when she and her momma move into the grand white house on the edge of New Orleans. It is framed by trees, the long willowy kinds with thin leaves like fingers. The neighbors are kind, a man with gray hair and a round belly (who kind of looks like Santa Claus but younger, but her momma tells her, between teary-eyed laughs, never to tell him that) stopping by to offer a tray of lemon bars and a helping hand to care for the paint the house sorely needs and the junk the house sorely needs to be rid of.

Her momma takes the lemon bars along with the offer for help, and the day after they’ve moved the few big pieces of furniture they own into the house, the man, Tom, joins them to test the breaker box and rip out the ancient wallpaper. While her momma and Tom guide each other over the whir of power tools in the basement, Monica eyes the cardboard boxes piled in the corner of the kitchen, leftover belongings from whoever lived here last.

Her mother has told her many times that she’s at that age when knickknacks are the most valuable and most useless objects a kid could want. It doesn’t stop her from compiling a small bag’s worth of soap stone creatures, pressed flowers, a figurine of one of the Beatles whose name she never bothered to know.

Monica knows that they are junk. But they’re hers.

None of the cardboard boxes contain the kinds of knickknacks that she’d normally file away in the little leather bag that’s all she has left of her father. They’re papers, mostly, with names and numbers that she doesn’t have the time or patience or knowledge to bother with, not yet at least. Ancient, moth-bitten clothes, books with yellowing pages, some photos of a plain-faced white man and woman who must have owned the house before, their forgotten things nothing more than trinkets, useless to even Monica.

Except a short, purple cylinder toward the bottom of the last box, lavender flowers painted over the lid. Her momma will tell her it’s nothing but a hatbox, and not even a good one at that, with no hats inside it. Instead, one little knit ragdoll roughly the size of Monica’s six-year-old forearm, and a small, rectangular, wooden jewelry box with a golden lock and no key.

“This is what you wanna keep?” her momma will ask her, her forehead creased with disbelief. “A dusty little doll and a box you ain’t gonna be able to open?”

“I’m sure I could crack it open.” Tom’s offer comes with a good-natured smile. “I feel like I got a crowbar ‘round here somewhere small enough.”

“No,” Monica insists, and someday she will be surprised by how firmly she says it. “I don’t wanna break it. We can find the key if we try hard enough. Right, momma?”

“I’m sure we can, baby. It’s, uh..an awful big house, but we got all the time in the world.”

“Sure,” Tom says, the word coming out like _shore_. He tells her he reckons the boxes belonged to the folk who used to live here, the family who’d owned the place since something like the twenties.

Sometime later, Monica will hear in whispers that the daughter of the house had died young, fresh-faced and unmarried herself, some car accident or drowning or fire on her way north. Tonight, she falls asleep in her bare bones room with the dusty little doll under her arm and the jewelry box on the floor beside her.

She dreams of kisses that smell like her momma’s cocoa butter, something cool like mint, something warm and soft, like summer breeze.

2.

They never do find the key. After the house is cleaned and painted, after her momma’s Air Force checks fill each room with the kind of knickknacks they can agree on, after the two of them screw together a bookcase as tall as the ceiling and stuff it with their favorite books, somehow, there’s no key to be found.

Monica memorizes her new address like she practices blowing bubblegum, testing the numbers and letters out on her tongue day and night until she can carry them with her on her bicycle to the closest library in the city. In a few years, the movie _Matilda_ will come out, and when Monica is a little older, she will see her younger self in the magic hands of the young girl reaching across the counter for books that nobody would believe she can read.

She recites her address to the librarian, a tall woman who reaches for a forgotten box on a top shelf and files through it with her long, slender fingers, before producing the folder of city records coinciding with the house that Monica lives in. It is almost as dusty as the boxes that she has looked through with her momma, but she says thank you anyhow.

It doesn’t take too long to trace the cursive letters that spell out _1801 Rue de Laveau_ , followed by a printed set of names next to four-digit numbers that she slowly interprets as years. Her finger stops when it reaches the fourth name next to 1920: _Darcy Lewis, 2 years._

There are no pictures in the city records, but she’s certain when she gets home that this is the little girl her doll belonged to. She pictures a girl with soft brown hair that matches the doll’s, wide blue eyes like her doll’s buttons, a big pink smile.

Darcy the doll sits at the third chair at dinner that night, and the night after, and the night after that.

“I don’t have to make Darcy dinner now, too, do I?” Maria asks one night, her fork sliding through the green beans on her plate. “God knows I’ve already got one little rascal who don’t like her string beans enough to ask for seconds.”

Monica smiles at her mother, her left hand on top of Darcy the doll’s, and scoops up her mashed potatoes. “No, momma. But I might need your help makin’ her tea for our tea party tomorrow.”

“That’s fine,” Maria promises, not knowing how much sweet tea a ragdoll could possibly consume, nor how much she _will_ consume over the next two years of her daughter’s life. This is approximately how much longer Monica will have patience for the doll, before she becomes preoccupied with her mother’s planes, with her social studies classes as much as her science classes, before she loses interest in the ghost of a woman she has never met and will never meet.

For the next two years, Darcy the doll is Monica’s best friend, her confidante to every secret or silly story that Monica has to tell. She is patient where Monica’s friends and her mother are not; she is conspiratorial when Monica’s mischievous - which is often.

Once, when they steal a cookie straight from the pan and it leaves a small gray blister on Monica’s wrist, Darcy the doll is the one to kiss it better. Monica is too proud to confess to her mother. So she and Darcy the doll eat the cookie through their tears in her bedroom, unaware that Maria can hear every last sniffle.

But there are some problems even Darcy can’t fix.

3.

On a warm spring Wednesday afternoon, Monica pushes her front door open with her math test in the air, the brick-lettered “A” bright and shining next to her name. She is almost nine years old, and Darcy the doll lies tucked under the top cover of Monica’s bed, where she sleeps and wakes every night and every morning. Monica’s knees are dotted with bandages, the small price of being a child who likes to run and play every chance she gets.

Impatient to tell Maria about her score, she calls out for her momma, ducking her head into the living room when she gets no reply.

“Momma?”

When she pokes her head into the kitchen, Maria’s back is to her, the soft white coil of the telephone quivering between her fingers. Monica goes to shout for her momma again, to wave her test above her head, but when she hears her mother’s voice, her heart drops like a sack of lead.

“I saw, momma, I saw...no, we’re fine, she just got home. I will, I promise. You be safe...please, momma.”

Her mother’s hand shakes as it rests the phone back into its cradle. She pastes on a smile when she turns to look at Monica, but the puffiness under her eyes and the tear tracks on her cheeks tells Monica all she needs to know.

She lets her math test fall to her side and wraps her arms around her momma’s middle, squeezing tight. Her momma runs her fingers through her hair before flattening it with her palm. She hasn’t seen her momma cry so hard in such a long time, so much that her whole body shakes when she holds onto Monica. This is scary, and strange, and off, and Monica wonders, for a second, if her momma is sick or if she’s dying or if there’s been an accident.

Her questions are answered when her mother turns on the news. She sees a row of buildings busted up and burning, men lying in the street, a woman being held back as she cries open-mouthed, before the screen is filled with one resounding image that she remembers vaguely from the previous year: one man on the ground with four more around him, rounded sticks in the air that pummeled down like heavy rain onto him. When she is older, she will carry the weight of this day with her as an adult, never having met Rodney King, never having visited California. 

One year later, and Los Angeles is on fire.

Monica sits tucked into Maria’s side after a dinner they barely eat that night, and after her bedtime has passed and after the news has ended, Maria has her sit between her legs and runs a brush through her hair.

“I ever tell you about my seventh grade math teacher?” her momma asks, her voice soft and sweet as she slides her hands through Monica’s scalp. Monica squeezes down on Darcy, her fingernails digging into the old raggedy dress of a doll that is no longer a confidante and friend but a child’s habit that she just can’t seem to kick.

“Uh-uh.”

She hears the smile in her momma’s voice, tight and high. “Missus Wexler. Awful, old goat of a woman. When we were in middle school, we didn’t have career days, we had mentor days. Worked with one of the teachers in the field we wanted to study on a project about the job we wanted to have one day.

“I wanted to ask my science teacher Mr. Flagg to be my mentor, because he was the one who taught me about physics and flight, but I didn’t have his class until the afternoon, and by the time I got to him, he had already told five students he’d be their mentor, and that was as many as he could take. I liked the rest of my teachers, but I thought Mrs. Wexler made sense because she taught us all these math problems about movement and directions and rockets and things like that, so I figured I’d give her a try.” Monica hears her momma lick her finger to press a stray piece of hair into place.

“So after we finished up class I walked up to her desk with the mentor form in my hand, and I looked up at her, ‘cause she was about six feet tall, like some huge, crinkly vulture. And she looked back at me, and I said, ‘ma’am, will you please be my teacher mentor for mentor days? I’d like to be a pilot when I get older.’”

“And what did she say?” Monica whispers, trying her best not to wince when one of her curls gets tangled in the brush.

“She told me that no airline wanted a little colored girl flying their planes, and I’d be better off studying to be an accountant or a secretary.” Maria’s hands stop moving over her daughter’s head, and come to rest at her shoulders. “There’s gonna be people all over this world who think you can’t do something or you can’t be somebody just because of the way you were born. Being a girl, or being Black, or having ideas that are too big, too special, too different…”

She pulls back gently on Monica’s head to plant a small, tear-streaked kiss square in the middle of her eyebrows. “I want you to know that none of that matters one bit, baby. What matters is _you_ , and what you do with your dreams.”

4.

Toward the end of November, Mr. DuBois ushers a small girl with finely braided hair and smooth tan skin into the classroom. She stands in front of the only empty desk, holding a small backpack with all the colors of the rainbow close to her chest. She doesn’t look up at the rest of the class.

“Everyone,” Mr. DuBois drawls, slipping his thumbs through his belt loops. “I’d like y’all to give a warm welcome to Miss Krista Salcedo.”

He says it like “sal-see-doe.” Monica knows this must be wrong, because the girl stifles an embarrassed laugh into her hand. Mr. DuBois glances down at her through his thick bifocals before turning his attention back to the rest of the room.

“She’s just moved here from New Mexico, and I expect y’all to treat her with the utmost kindness. Is that understood?”

Monica has never met any of her mother’s drill sergeants, but she’s got a feeling that Mr. DuBois might have been one in a previous life. He stands at attention while Krista slides into her seat, ducking her head down, as if this would simply stop everyone from looking at her.

Krista sits at the end of a long gray table in the cafeteria when it’s time for lunch. She dumps the contents of a brown paper bag onto the spot in front of her - a plastic wrapped bologna sandwich, a tub of applesauce, and one sad bag of Doritos. Monica buys an extra chocolate milk from the lunch line and then gently sets her tray down across from Krista as she falls into the opposite seat.

“Hi,” she says, pushing the chocolate milk carton across the table. “You don’t have a drink, so I got you some chocolate milk.”

“Thanks,” Krista says. Her voice is as small as she is, and she keeps her head down while she eats. Monica waits for her to say something else. When she doesn’t, Monica takes a deep breath.

“Uh, I’m Monica. Monica Rambeau.” Krista dips her spoon into her applesauce, silent. “How come you moved from New Mexico?”

She looks up quickly, so fast that Monica wonders if she might’ve imagined her big, almond-shaped brown eyes, and then back down into her lunch. “My mom cheated on my dad.”

Monica is old enough by now to know clearly what cheating on a test is, almost too young to really know what cheating on a spouse is. She has seen her mother kiss her grandma, her aunts and uncles and the friends that are close enough for Monica to call aunt or uncle, but the most she’s learned of romance is from pretending she isn’t watching Maria’s TV shows before bedtime.

She cannot say all of this succinctly as Krista waits on a response of some kind, so she just lets her mouth hang open before asking, “What?”

Krista leans in closer, her eyebrows folding together. “My mom. Had _s-e-x_ with some guy she works with. So me and my dad and my brother left. And now that guy’s her boyfriend.”

Sex is (and, if we’re being honest, always will be) kind of an awkward thing. Based on the brief and red-cheeked lessons Mrs. Kelvin gives them about erections and menstruations (the girls go with her every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, and the boys stay with Mr. DuBois), Monica has never really been sure of how grownups physically manage it. She snaps her mouth shut and leans back on her bench, opens up her milk carton, and drinks it for a long, slow moment.

“Um...I’m sorry.”

Krista shrugs. This is not the response Monica would have if her mom cheated on her dad. Not that she remembers much about him. “It’s okay. I like my dad. I just don’t know if I like New Or-leens yet.”

Monica frowns. “You mean, New Orleans?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know. That’s just the way you’re supposed to say it.”

Both of them go quiet for a moment, and Monica almost begins to regret taking this spot. She closes her fists around the edge of the tray and starts to dig her heel in to stand up, but then Krista speaks again.

“How long have you been in...New Orleans?”

After lunch is over, the girls spend most of recess swinging a tetherball back and forth and talking about everything except their parents.

“Do you wanna come play at my house tomorrow?” Monica asks her when the bell rings, as they file back into the lines leading to their classroom. “I got a Nintendo for my birthday, and I can show you my mom’s plane collections - they’re pretty cool.”

Krista cocks her head at the suggestion about the planes, but smiles so bright her pearly white teeth shine across her whole face. “Yeah, okay. I’ll ask my dad.”

Over the next school day, Monica and Krista cast each other excited grins, practically bouncing with anticipation from their seats to the cafeteria to the yard and back to class, before the final bell releases them for the day. They lace their hands together and wave goodbye to the yard duty Miss Delia, and skip half the way home.

“What games you got on your Nintendo?” Krista asks, hastily unwrapping a fat pink drop of bubblegum and popping it into her mouth. She passes Monica a second one.

“I got Joust, Ghostbusters, The Addams Family, Pinball Quest, um...Mario Brothers?”

“Cool.” Her cheeks go hollow when she blows the gum into a big pink circle. “Antonio hogs the Nintendo we have at home. Papa doesn’t think I like video games.”

That’s silly, Monica thinks, as she tries to blow a bubble of her own, only managing to tangle a strand of her hair in the gum when a stray gust of wind pushes it into her face. Krista snorts when she laughs, gently elbowing Monica in the ribs as she fumbles to get her bubblegum free.

They arrive at her house around 3:45, and the way Krista’s mouth hangs open as she takes it in tells Monica she’s not exactly familiar with the swampland that most of Louisiana is made out of. Monica stands on tiptoe to pluck an orchid off one of the trees swaying with the breeze and hands it to her, smiling expectantly.

“It’s just you and your mom here?” Krista whispers, like she can hardly believe it herself.

“Yeah.” She shrugs, feeling like she should mention that her Grandma Lou and Papa Ozzie come around every Thanksgiving and Easter, and that even when it’s just Monica and Maria, it never feels too big or too empty for the two of them. Three, if you count Darcy, which Monica has mostly stopped doing, apart from the nights when the thunder gets too big and too loud and Monica needs her cradled to her chest. “I like it.”

“Is this Krista?” her mom grins, emerging from the garage with an oil-soaked rag in her hands. “Welcome to our place, sweetheart. Are you gonna be staying for supper?”

“No, ma’am.” Her voice turns sugary sweet, in a way that Monica hasn’t heard it go the whole two days she’s known her. “My daddy’s s’posed to pick me up around six o’clock. He likes us to eat all together as a family.”

Maria smiles and brushes a small curtain of sweat from her forehead. “Your daddy sounds like a smart man. I cut up some fruit if you girls are hungry right now, it’s in the fridge under the milk. Monica, you can show her around, okay? I still got a little work to do, and I’ll be up in a little bit to start us some supper.”

“Okay, momma.”

After they all but finish the serving bowl full of strawberries, pineapple, and fresh watermelon slices, Monica drags the Nintendo and a box of her games out of the hall closet, and they giggle over Super Mario’s mustache, talking about how they never wanna kiss a man with a mustache.

“My daddy has a mustache,” Krista says, and she snorts so hard when she laughs that she hiccups. “It looks like a big, fat, fuzzy caterpillar.”

Monica wrinkles her nose, but she knows better than to say anything bad about another girl’s family. “I don’t remember my daddy much. I don’t _think_ he had a mustache.”

Krista nods, pounding hard on the jump button, but one of the mushroom-headed Goombas touches Mario anyway, and he looks straight on at them before flopping into his “Game Over” sequence. “That’s lame,” Krista says, dropping the controller like it’s burned her.

Monica wants to get mad - wants to tell Krista not to drop her stuff like that - but she chews her lip. She doesn’t have friends over much, because she doesn’t have many friends, and getting mad at Krista might make her not want to come over again. She swallows down all the ugly things she wants to say, and says instead, “Let’s play somethin’ else.”

The rest of the afternoon goes by pretty smoothly; they switch games another once or twice, and eventually Monica brings out the dollhouse she and her momma painted when she was littler. She makes sure not to leave a mess - knows her momma would raise hell over it if she did. There’s a creeping little voice in the back of her head that notices Krista doesn’t really help her clean anything up, just starts playing with whatever new thing she’d brought out. She chews on her tongue, and tries not to mind too much as Krista at least plays dolls the way Monica likes.

The sky goes dark before a rumbling purple car rolls up the dirt driveway to Maria and Monica’s house, and Krista begins to whine under her breath before her father even opens the driver door. He is tall and strong-looking, with brown skin that looks shining bronze even under the moonlight. His mustache isn’t so bad, Monica thinks, as she gets started putting the little wooden dolls back in her toybox. This time, Krista helps a little, but Monica doesn’t know that _throwing_ her things in the box really counts as cleaning.

“Mr. Salcedo,” Monica’s momma says, opening the door wide with her hip, her hands and apron coated in flour and sauce but her smile as bright and perfect as always. “Come on in, Krista and Monica should be in the living room. Can I get you somethin’ to drink? A Coke or sweet tea or somethin’?”

When he steps across the threshold, Mr. Salcedo takes the soft white cowboy hat off his head and turns it in his hands. He looks much younger than Monica would’ve expected, from the way Krista had talked about him. His smile is handsome and lopsided. “A Coke would be nice, Mrs. Rambeau. Thank you.”

“Just Miss,” Maria corrects, her back already to him while she makes her way toward the kitchen, bending to retrieve a fresh Coke bottle from the fridge. “Girls? You almost done cleanin’ up in there?”

Krista shakes her head violently at Monica, who pretends to be looking into her lap. “Almost, momma.”

Before Mr. Salcedo can usher his daughter out the door, Krista throws both arms around Monica and hugs her tight. “I had a lotta fun today. You should come over to our place next time.” She turned her gaze up to Maria, eyes big and wide and shiny. “Thank you for lettin’ me over, Miss Rambeau. I had a real good time.”

Her momma flashed a brilliant smile. “You’re very welcome, Krista. I hope we’ll be seein’ you again, real soon.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Krista said, smiling back sugary sweet. “I hope so, too.”

5.

Monica will not learn the term “frenemies” for at least a few more years, but this describes perfectly the relationship that she and Krista maintain through middle school. One week they’re tight, eating lunch and laughing at their teachers and crazy boys and huddling up to the latest TLC (when Monica gets to pick the song) or Boyz II Men (when Krista does); the next week they give each other the stink-eye across the cafeteria over something they think the other one said. Momma calls it a love-hate relationship, warns Monica that friends like that aren’t worth their weight in gold.

Monica usually shrugs at her momma’s advice, because at least Krista keeps things interesting.

Granted, Monica and Maria don’t exactly need anyone to keep things interesting early in the fall before Monica starts seventh grade. Because Aunt Carol comes back from the dead.

Shows up on their doorstep, along with a secret agent man who looks a whole lot like Shaft (don’t tell Maria that she watched it at Krista’s place), a little orange cat, and a whole mess of green-skinned aliens with elf ears.

Monica remembers Aunt Carol from when she was real little - always brought candy and let Monica wear her sunglasses, even when her momma wouldn’t. When Aunt Carol died, it messed up Maria real bad. Most of that year, Grandma Lou and Papa Ozzie stayed at their house, Papa Ozzie wrapping himself in an apron and teaching Monica to cook up his famous chicken piccata, and Grandma Lou picking her up and dropping her off from kindergarten, teaching her checkers when she didn’t have homework. She had heard hushed conversations between her momma and Grandma Lou, ones that she wasn’t meant to hear, with Grandma Lou whisper-yelling at Maria that she needed to pick herself up outta this funk she was in, for her baby. Maria whisper-yelled back, Grandma Lou didn’t know what it was like to lose someone like Carol. Someone who was a part of her, who felt like home.

Now that she’s back, Aunt Carol needs Maria, to fight another set of aliens who aren’t quite so green and pointy-eared - most of them, anyway. Monica isn’t about to let her momma miss out on fighting _aliens_.

Aunt Carol is still cool as a cucumber, the way Monica remembers her, when she rolls up in her superhero costume, asking for color advice. “You got good taste, kid,” she mutters, when Monica throws her arms around her waist before she and the rest of the gang head into the sky. “I’ll take care of your mom. You hold down the fort here, okay?”

“You got it,” Monica whispers.

When they return a few days later, Monica’s momma is the happiest she’s seen her in a long time, even when Aunt Carol takes back off into the stars looking fresh as hell in the red, blue, and gold Monica had helped her design.

“She’s gonna come back, right?” Monica asks, as Maria tucks her into bed later that night.

“Someday,” her momma answers, thumbing a curl away from her forehead. “Someday, she’ll step right back down from those stars and bring you her favorite alien candy, and you guys can go back to makin’ fun of me and my Mariah Carey songs.”

Monica giggles. “Mariah Carey _is_ pretty corny, momma.”

“I know, sweetie.” With a tender kiss that Monica should be too old for, Maria turns out the light. “Good night.”

Once the door gently swings closed, Monica reaches under her bed for something else she is definitely too old for, a squishy little rag doll that fits perfectly against her chest, even after all these years.

The niceness doesn’t last too long. Only a few nights after Maria and Aunt Carol come back, they receive a surprise guest in the form of Mr. Salcedo, no Krista in sight.

His hat in his hands, the way Monica has seen him everytime he shows up to their house, he stands on the doorstep wearing a smile that she’d describe as _sheepish_ , her favorite word from this week’s vocabulary lessons.

“Can I come in, Miss Rambeau?” he says softly, his big green eyes wide and hopeful. Monica tries not to pay mind to the strange way that her momma’s voice sounds when she responds - almost _painful_.

“I’ve asked you too many times, Jorge,” Maria sighs, but steps back to let him in anyway, “just Maria.” When she sees Monica lurking in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, she raises her eyebrows in the universal symbol for _‘shoo!’_ Monica commits to the living room, closing the door at least most of the way, but lingers close by enough to listen.

“Maria, you know it’s been a while since we moved here, since me and the kids’ mother split.”

“Yes, Jorge, been almost three years now.” Monica expects her to say more, but she doesn’t.

“Well, you know I...I haven’t been with anybody else. Not before Eliana, and not since, but…” She hears him expel a long, tired breath. The doll that she shouldn’t even play with anymore, nearly tearing at the seams and the blue buttons of her eyes so loose they hang off her face, sits close to her side. “You’re a beautiful woman, Maria. You’re a good mom, smart, kind to my girl…”

“Jorge,” Maria says, sounding like she’s begging. “Please, I’m not…”

“This is a _big_ house for just you and Monica. You have to be lonely...it can’t be easy to be here, just on your lonesome.”

“We make it just fine, Jorge. It’s been me and Monica for a long time now. She’s my whole world, and even if she weren’t enough - ”

“What am I missing? I’m a good man, I have a good job, I could take care of you - ”

“I don’t _need_ to be taken care of. It ain’t what I ever needed, and it sure as hell ain’t what I want. You’re a very nice man, Jorge, but I don’t need - I don’t _want_ any man takin’ care of me.”

The kitchen goes silent. When her momma gets real irritated, the Southern accent slips in and out faster, and Monica knows her well enough to know that she’s simmering like a tea kettle about to blow.

“Not any man, huh?” Mr. Salcedo says, and even Monica is old enough to recognize the venom in his voice through the door. “Okay. I get it. This have anything to do with that blonde chick I seen roll up to your place the other night?”

One more heavy, poisonous silence. “Have you been _watching_ me?”

“I could fix you, you know. Women like you don’t get it, but you aren’t far gone enough that a little bit of a guy like me could turn you back right.” Monica’s heart goes cold - she’s not sure completely what he means by this, but the way he says it, she knows that it is the ugliest kind of trouble.

Something clatters in the kitchen, and Monica’s fist wraps around the handle, ready to yank it open and do whatever a nearly-twelve-year-old might do when her momma might be in trouble, but when Maria speaks next, her voice loud and strong and defiant, she freezes. “Now I’m sure there’s _only_ a little bit of you, Jorge, and it damn well ain’t enough to impress me or ‘fix’ me one bit. Get the hell outta my house before I kick your sorry ass out.”

He slams the front door, and Monica only has about ten seconds to dash to the couch, crack open the nearest book, and pretend she wasn’t listening, before her momma returns, breathing heavily, her cheeks the angriest red Monica’s ever seen them. But when she speaks, this time, her voice falls measured and soft. “Time for bed, baby.”

“Momma?” Monica says, her heart heavy in her throat and her eyes prickling for a reason she can’t perfectly name yet. “Are you okay?”

Maria walks her up the stairs, one hand combing soothingly through her hair. “I’m fine, honey. Don’t you worry about me.”

Inevitably, she does.

Worries so much that she gets suspended the following day at school for rearing her fist back and savoring the crunch that Krista’s nose makes after they fight for the final time.

Because at lunch, in the middle of the cafeteria, Krista accidentally on purpose smacks her shoulder against her with a sneer on those pink lip glossed lips, and the sick feeling in Monica’s stomach knows exactly why.

“Don’t touch me,” Monica grumbles, hunching down into her seat.

“Why?” Krista says, too loud for it just to be directed at Monica. Heat simmers in her throat, but the strange truth is, she doesn’t care one bit about the heads that start to turn her way. “Gonna get all excited? You an ugly _bull-dyke_ like your momma?”

Monica doesn’t hear whether anyone laughs or gasps or shouts or screams. All she knows in that moment is her hand balling up and cracking the cartilage between Krista’s eyes.

She doesn’t even hear the guidance counselor shrieking, or the principal’s monotone as he sentences her to three days’ out-of-school suspension, or even her teacher’s soft disappointment as she brings the worksheets Monica will need to complete by the time she returns.

All she hears the rest of that day is her momma’s voice from the front seat of the car, flat and even and, if Monica listens _real_ closely, just the tiniest bit proud, telling her never to let someone else’s bullshit hit her that deep.

“You don’t need to give anybody the power to hurt you with their dumb-ass words, Monica Rambeau. You understand me? Least of all trash like Krista Salcedo.”

Monica has heard whispers of what Krista’s dumb-ass word means. When she nods her head yes to her momma, she tries to pretend, to forget that it was directed at her.

6.

Monica accepts every punishment that her school and that her mother dole out. Mostly because she’d rather be at home finishing up her worksheets now than having to see Krista’s ugly face, and because her momma is at least sympathetic enough to let her listen to the music she wants to as she cleans up every square inch of the house as penance.

“Last thing is the fireplace,” Maria announces, on the final day of her suspension. As she tells Monica this, she is working on baking a pie that she promises is _not_ a reward for the end of her punishment. “That thing probably hasn’t been cleaned since the last people lived here. Now, I don’t need you scraping all the ashes clear from the whole chimney, but after you clear out any rotten old log bits from the bottom, you can be done.”

“Yes, momma.” Monica refuses to complain. Her momma lays a long plastic box beside the mantle to catch the wood bits, and before Monica can do it herself or even ask, Maria brings out the good boombox and nods over at the shelf with all their cassettes on it. “I can pick anything?”

“Go on. Make it count.”

She gets to cleaning over the familiar sounds of _Boombastic_. Maria shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything, and Monica is sure she sees her mother smile on the way back to the kitchen.

The biggest log bits are easy to spot, and she gets through them pretty quickly. But Monica wants to do a good job, so she gets to her knees and leans in close to collect even the smallest, blackest chunks of wood.

Eventually, her fingers find something decidedly not wooden. Something metallic.

For one fleeting moment, Monica opens her mouth to call for her mother, but the moment she closes her hand around the metal object, it’s as if her heart _knows_ what it is.

A key.

Dinner and dessert, even though they are her favorite of each, seem to last ages. If Maria wonders what exactly lit the fire under her daughter’s butt, she doesn’t ask. “You excited to go back to school? I know we haven’t talked about it much, but, um...I asked your principal to change your homeroom teacher.”

Distracted as she is, Monica breathes a sigh of relief. No more Krista, no more drama. “Thank you, momma.”

Maria reaches across the table, her hand sealing over her daughter’s. “I love you, baby. I don’t know if I don’t tell you this enough, but you’re my everything. Even when you do some real dumb shit like get your skinny butt suspended.”

Monica grins. “I love you, too, momma.”

The key almost burns a hole in her pocket, but by the time that Maria goes to bed, Monica finally, slowly, quietly pulls the dusty box out from under her mattress, Darcy the doll by her side, and plunges the key into its lock.

She doesn’t know what she’s expecting - a quick thrill goes through her as the lock clicks, and for a moment she pictures jewels, gold, a tiara, even though she knows this box is not nearly heavy or big enough to contain any of them - but it is definitely not one square of a newspaper and a small lopsided pile of yellowing envelopes.

She frowns at the newspaper piece first: a very old picture of a very beautiful girl. Her lips and cheeks are full, but the shallow smile she wears does not reach her crystal clear eyes. Her hair falls in elegant, shiny curls down her shoulders, and her clothes, from what Monica can see, look old-timey. Monica glances down at the doll falling apart at her side, and back to the bold lettering in the clipping: _DARCY LEWIS, 27, DEAD IN CAR ACCIDENT_.

Her stomach begins to hurt. She guesses, somewhere in her heart, that she’s always known the real Darcy couldn’t still be around. If she had, she would’ve been an old lady by now, but never having really thought about it until this moment, Darcy the doll has felt like an imaginary friend, almost a ghost, to comfort Monica when she’s hurt, keep her company when she’s lonely.

Now that she has a face, a life, a history, a death, it’s a lot like losing a friend. Only losing this friend hurts so much more.

According to the clipping, Darcy Lewis died in 1945, her car going over the railing of the Brooklyn Bridge late one night in February. She’d left behind her grieving mother and father, Elizabeth and William, and a man with no name who she was supposed to marry just one week later.

Monica swallows hard, but files past the clipping to the first envelope anyway.

_August 13, 1943_

_My dear Darcy,_

> _You have no idea how badly I have missed you these last years, and how excited I was to receive a letter from a friend I have held dear since our girlhood. Was it really by luck that you found my address in the papers?_
> 
> _It’s difficult to report on what you’ve missed since we were in school. As you can see, I’ve moved to New York, the real Big Apple itself! I went to the Columbia Female College in South Carolina for about a year and a half, but I guess the school wasn’t ready for me. Since ‘36 I’ve been working on playing my bass in the city, and just last year I joined a new girl group. It’s been just swell!_
> 
> _I’m talking too much about myself. How have things been for you? Did you end up teaching like you’d always hoped? If it’s not too forward, I’ve got to say that I always thought you could go a different direction; not that teaching isn’t swell, too, but you’ve got too big a spirit to be contained to a classroom. Most of our teachers were such bores. Maybe if you come visit sometime, you might find someplace in Manhattan that fits you the way playing jazz fits me._
> 
> _There I go again - sorry! I really would love to hear how you and your folks are. Do y’all still have that awful brown tyrant of a dog? He was a hell of a beast, probably weighed more than you and me combined! And of course, I’d love to hear all about any fella who might have caught the illustrious beauty Darcy Lewis’s eye. You deserve only the best, though, so I sure hope you haven’t settled for anything less._
> 
> _Well, write back soon, or I’ll simply be dying of anticipation. I look forward to reading what your lovely pen has got to write!_
> 
> _All my love,_
> 
> _Ava Starr_

Monica can’t be sure, but when she pulls the letter away from her face, the small movement makes her smell something. Something sweet and powdery. Later she will recognize that smell as perfume.

The next envelope has a very dry sprig of lavender tucked in with the letter. As careful as Monica tries to be pulling it out, it crumbles in her hand.

_November 4, 1943_

_Dear Miss Darcy Lewis,_

> _You’ll never believe it. Clara Ann, that awful new oboe I’ve told you about, has gone and put herself into a “delicate condition.” Her sweetheart would have been in France on deployment at the...impetus of this scandal, and I heard from a little bird that she’s run off with a butcher’s son whose store isn’t a block from her apartment. There is low-hanging fruit (or meat) in this story, but I certainly won’t be the one to grab for it._
> 
> _Speaking of food, thank you for sending that small armada of corn on the cob. As big and beautiful as this city is, they just don’t get our small home comforts right. It’s the only thing I’d trade about New York, plus the corn reminds me of those hometown parties the LeBeau family used to have every Fourth of July. I have remorse for approximately none of the lickings we got for misbehaving._
> 
> _In your next letter, will you please skip past all the darling coy parts where you tease me about who exactly you’ve been sweet on? I am about to start guessing, and I can also guess just how tomato red you get when I suggest someone I know would look so beautiful next to you, or someone you know you’ve whispered to me about when we were in school. The first name that comes to mind is Mr. Murdock, the history teacher! Shall I go on?_
> 
> _I look forward to all the elegant ink you splash in our next correspondence. You are a peach and a doll, all wrapped into one._
> 
> _All my love,_
> 
> _Ava Starr_

Monica frowns at the long date gap, and the things she must have missed from the first letter. It feels like there are letters in between, missing.

_December 28, 1943_

_Darcy C. Lewis, Esq.,_

> _A happiest New Year to the Venerable Miss Lewis. And my utter mortification that I did not earlier guess the ruggedly handsome Mr. Castle, the arithmetic teacher whom all the boys feared and emulated at once. He certainly had a nice smile, however rarely we saw him use it. I could be wrong, however, upon the topic of your mystery sweetheart. As I recall, Mr. Castle had the most lovely little family, so unless you have become the Venerable Town Harlot, it appears that I must continue to guess._
> 
> _Oh, Darcy, I finally had the money, the time, and the energy to visit Broadway._ _Something for the Boys_ _was spectacular, nothing like I’d ever seen before. When you visit, you must promise me that we’ll make a trip, the two of us. What a way it will be for us to make your secret suitor jealous, and surely will bring me suitors of the same type, only richer and handsomer._
> 
> _I would also like you to know that I am officially in love with the Savoy Ballroom. I don’t know how often the rags in New Orleans work accurate stories in about the Harlem music experience, but if I could I’d sleep backstage at the Savoy everyday and play there every night. There’s a professional dancer who plays with us sometimes and if I can’t secure the richest handsomest man who ever lived, she might make a good wife instead._
> 
> _I look forward to hearing from you soon. While I miss seeing your darling face and listening to your dulcet voice, I suppose these letters will just have to do until you come for a visit._
> 
> _All my love,_
> 
> _Ava Starr_

Monica wants to finger open the envelope of the next letter, but her shoulders have begun to sag and her eyelids to feel heavy. She makes sure that the next envelope is on the top of the stack and tucks it back into the jewelry box. Before she can pull her hand out, though, it brushes against something smooth, solid, that she hadn’t noticed before - a small gold ring at the bottom, with one square diamond in the middle.

The next day, her first day back at school, seems to last ages. Thankfully, Krista Salcedo can’t look her in the eye, and doesn’t bother with one more bit of nastiness - Monica knows she shouldn’t be proud of the plaster bandaging in the middle of her face, or the two dark circles under her eyes that make her look like a raccoon, but she’d be lying if seeing the mighty Krista fallen didn’t give her just a little bit of satisfaction.

A couple of the boys in her new homeroom class tell her at recess they think it was pretty cool how she kicked Krista’s ass. One of them is a tall, freckled, wide-shouldered boy named Logan, who she’s pretty sure is the handsomest thing she’s ever seen. She feels her cheeks go hot when he winks at her, and wonders if her suspension wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to her.

But by the time that the afternoon bell rings, she hasn’t forgotten about the box waiting for her at the foot of her bed. She blazes through her English homework, an essay on _The Giver_ , and asks her momma if it’s alright that she doesn’t watch TV with her afterwards like they sometimes do after school. She’s got some extra reading to catch up on, and tries not to look too excited about it.

“Okay,” Maria says, cautiously, like she knows her daughter is up to something. “But you better be back here for dinner at six o’clock sharp. Washed up and everything.”

“Okay, momma.” But before the word has left her mouth, she’s already in the hallway, walking fast toward her room.

_February 20, 1944_

_My dear Darcy Lewis,_

> _It is my sad confession to you that I have not yet married rich or handsome, or even that dancer from the Savoy, even with Valentine’s Day having come and gone. I suppose you shall have to do as my Valentine, provided your secret beloved doesn’t mind, and so I have sent you a lock of my hair to remember me by._
> 
> _How was your folks’ annual Valentine’s bash? I know how Mr. and Mrs. Lewis just love to do one up for the loneliest day of the year for everyone else, and their matchmaking schemes tend to end either in a fairy tale or a calamity. Didn’t they try to pair up Marla Keller with old Freddie Wilson one year? With no idea how Marla had been pining after him, and Freddie having none of it? I remember being positively mortified the way Marla ran from the room, and when your mother said, “Bless her poor little heart, she’s overcome!” I wanted so badly to hit Freddie over the head and toss him out. Perhaps when I’m throwing giant parties of my own, on my own land, trying to pull the strings of boys and girls in town, I will also be able to drown myself in theatrics._
> 
> _I miss you something awful, so please tell me you’ll buy a train ticket up to see me soon. No one questions the colors of friendship up here, so you won’t look so terribly pale next to me with that flawless skin of yours. If you’re short on money, say the word and I will buy the ticket for you. This is how much I miss you._
> 
> _I look forward to seeing you someday soon. Please do write back and tell me you’ll come._
> 
> _All my love,_
> 
> _Ava Starr_

When Monica opens the envelope wider, there is indeed a small, curly lock of thick dark hair, and when she pinches it between her fingers, something swells up in her heart - Ava’s hair was like hers.

It was very weird how old-timey people just chopped off and sent bits of their hair to each other, she thinks, but she’s read about folks doing it all the time. What exactly their friends or family or lovers would _do_ with that hair, she’s not entirely sure. But with the bag of knickknacks that she’s had collecting dust under the foot of her bed since pretty much the day she was born, she guesses she’s not really one to judge.

_April 17, 1944_

_Dearest Darcy,_

> _The time you spent up here a few weeks back was far too short for my liking, but I cannot begin to tell you the fun I had. It was as though nothing had changed between us, and I cannot remember the last time I laughed so hard, having missed your sharp tongue and your wild eyes. You are too clever for New Orleans, certainly too clever for Manhattan, but just the right amount of clever for me._
> 
> _Before I go mooning about you for the next page and a half of my correspondence, I did want to say how sorry I was to hear about our old playmate Remy LeBeau. My mother called to tell me the news, and I still have a hard time recognizing that the mischievous boy of our childhood is no longer around. I’m certain he died nobly in the war, and I hope that the feast he receives in heaven is as Cajun as he is._
> 
> _You know I don’t like to talk of serious things for too long, but for some reason, hearing of Remy’s dying has made me long for you to visit again soon. Perhaps it is the silent but ever-present ghost of war always on the horizon that has made me sentimental. I shudder to imagine how Mrs. LeBeau is handling the news, and it makes me think of all the other boys whose mothers weep for them day in and day out._
> 
> _You are terribly lucky that your betrothed is returning home to you in mostly one piece. I have heard awful things about what the Nazis are doing to our boys overseas, and I am glad that when you and your gentleman are reunited, you shall be able to hold him as tightly as so many sweethearts wish they could._
> 
> _Please promise me that even when you are married less than one short year from now, you won’t forget about me? I know that married women only seem to like hanging about other married women, but I hope that my upcoming status as an old spinster cannot deter how charming our friendship has been, and how dearly I hold you in my heart. If I could, I would ask you and your sweetheart to move up to the city together just so I could see you all the time. We could even share an apartment, if you like, a nice one, with big windows looking out over the Hudson, and room enough for as many children as you want, so long as I still have a room and a friend to call home._
> 
> _As usual, I look forward to reading your next letter. Your kind pen always brings a flutter of joy to my heart._
> 
> _All my love,_
> 
> _Ava Starr_

Monica swallows again. She is not old enough to know exactly what love is, but if she didn’t know any better, the letters from Ava sound more like letters from someone so deeply in love with someone else, than letters to a friend. She tucks this paper back into the envelope, needing a break from the strange heaviness in her heart, and trails back out to the living room to finish up watching the Oprah Winfrey Show a few minutes before it’s over.

If her momma notices a difference, she doesn’t say anything.

7.

Monica Rambeau does not open the jewelry box or any of the other letters in it for another two years. It lies next to Darcy the doll and the little leather bag that is all she has left of her father, beneath the foot of her bed, almost forgotten. Puberty is a busy time, and it is with a sigh of relief the weeks before her freshman year that she finds out the Salcedo family is moving back to New Mexico. In the spring, Krista has asked her to sign her eighth grade yearbook anyway, and with a tender smile that bears more respect in it than she ever showed when they were friends, she thanks Monica for the brief message “Have a good summer” and her curlicue signature beneath.

Logan, the boy that is broad-shouldered and handsome, and sometimes a bit too loud and with a bit too much fire in him, kisses her the last day of summer vacation, outside an ice cream store where they have their first date. For the next few days, her lips tingle with the ghost of his touch, and he calls every night, tying up the phone so that her momma yells to her down the hallway whenever she needs to use the Internet.

She starts freshman year with a boyfriend, her heart fit to burst with all the beautiful things she likes about him. His arms feel both foreign and welcome when they wrap around her waist, and he lets her play with his hair when it’s not too hot. She writes him little notes and sprays cucumber melon mist on them so he’ll smell of her when he reads them. On the days that he has a football game, she wears his jersey to school.

It feels special. It feels like first love.

He comes over to her house to play the new Nintendo 64 with her, and Maria promises them that she’ll be working on her planes in the kitchen, and if things ever get too quiet, she might just pop her head in to make sure they’re not dead. Monica knows this means no kissing in the living room, but she rolls her eyes and laughs at her momma anyway. When they kiss in the living room, they only let their lips linger on each other’s for a few seconds, before going back to joking and laughing, and kicking each other’s ass at Mario Kart.

Logan breaks up with her two weeks after homecoming. He tells her that he was benched at the freshman homecoming game because he has been distracted from football, and it will be better for both of them if maybe he doesn’t come over anymore. The following day, Monica sees him hand-in-hand with a blonde girl who is taller than her and wears too much mascara.

Maria tries to make her feel better, baking her another pie and offering to take her to the movies, just the two of them, but Monica, like any fourteen-year-old having been dumped by her puppy love would, slams her bedroom door and thinks about lighting the jersey Logan forgot to take back on fire.

Then, like a bad habit, like sucking her thumb or crossing her eyes or falling asleep with her regular clothes on, Monica slides the wooden jewelry box out from under her bed, props the dusty, raggedy doll in her lap, and finds her place in the mess, remembering somewhere in the back of her mind that Ava Starr’s words about Darcy marrying that mystery gentleman sounded an awful lot like the sound of a heart cracking in two.

The next letter does not disappoint her need to commiserate.

_November 13, 1944_

_Dear Darcy,_

> _I know that the long hiatus between my last letter and this one cannot be explained without apology, and for that I offer every regret I can muster up. But if you had seen me try, in vain, to begin the many letters that I have balled up and thrown into the bin with your name at the top and mine at the bottom, perhaps you might understand the difficulty with which I am finding the words to tell you the real truth._
> 
> _I have wished that I could say how happy I am for you and for your husband-to-be, but if I were to lie to you in such a bald-faced manner, without acknowledging the depth of the happiness you deserve and how selfishly I wish that I were not lying, I don’t think I could ever forgive myself._
> 
> _We have been friends for most of our lives, and I have spent my most glorious days lying beside you in the grass and the sunshine, whispering secrets and laughing with each other, and growing up to be women who still laugh, who still tell secrets, when so many like us have become dull with age and the claws of what our parents and our world expect from us. You are beyond a doubt the most radiant person I have ever known, and I don’t know what kind of person I would be having never met you. Perhaps it would not cause me the pain with which I pen these cursed words._
> 
> _I do not love you like the friend of my girlhood, Darcy Carol Lewis. I do not love you for toys and immaturity and passed notes under the ringing of the schoolhouse bell. I do not love you for chasing lightning bugs together or for causing ruckuses at family parties._
> 
> _I love you like the woman that you are and the woman that you make me feel. I love your lipstick-stained letters, and the vision of you in that smart striped jacket rushing toward me at the train station, and every word like a song that you write to me when I await an envelope with your name on it by my mailbox. I love your shining eyes and your blazing passion and the way that your brow wrinkles when you tell me off for letting my mouth go before my brain has a chance to catch up._
> 
> _I love you like I wish I could take the place of the man to whom you’ve promised your life, because I know whatever life I would promise you, as menial and as poor as it might seem, would contain the love of a thousand years, and possibly more. I do not doubt that the honorable sergeant will bring you much happiness, and all the children you could possibly want, but I_ _wish_ _, so deeply inside of myself, that it were not him that you had chosen._
> 
> _Earlier I said that I could never forgive myself if I were to lie to you about how I wished you every happiness in the world with him, but now I wonder if I can forgive myself for writing you the truth. No matter how evil or abominable you might find me for admitting this pained and selfish love, I cannot live a moment longer without your knowing. I love you and only you, Darcy Lewis. And if you would have me, which I fear you will not but fear even greater that you might, I am certain that I could make you as happy as you make me, in spite of this torment._
> 
> _I know I promised that I would marry the richest and handsomest man either of us had ever seen, but there is nothing richer or more handsome to me than the idea of spending the rest of my life by your side. I understand if you wish never to write to me again, but hope, that terrible beautiful thing with feathers, will live in my heart until the day that I die._
> 
> _Truly, with all my love,_
> 
> _Ava Starr_

Monica doesn’t try to hold back any of the tears this time. They fall freely down her face, snot bubbling beneath her nose that she wipes away with her sleeve, like a child. She can’t read any more today, but lies awake that night, her eyes locked on the ceiling, unable to disentangle the heartache of Ava from her own.

Her mother thinks that she has long since gone to bed, but she sneaks to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water just before dawn, feeling fresh and raw like a barely healed wound. On her way back to her bedroom, she notices that Maria’s door is cracked open, moonlight flooding the floor except for one shadow by the window.

Her mother kneels by the windowsill, still and silent, both elbows resting on the wood in front of the glass, her gaze pointed up and out. Monica wonders if she is waiting for the sun to rise, to watch the creeping pink fingers of dawn stretch across the sky, before she realizes something.

Her mother’s bedroom faces the direction that the sun sets, the west. She is not waiting for the sun to rise, but waiting for the moon to sink, the stars to fade.

8.

There is only one letter left in the jewelry box, and the small plain ring whose shine fractures the wooden insides when light overhead hits its crystalline structure. Monica cannot read the last letter for a few days, afraid of what Ava’s heartache will read like, afraid to accept her response to Darcy’s dying, afraid of the date that haunts the ending of a life that Monica never really knew.

But once she finally slides her finger past the open envelope, the handwriting is not the long, thin, dashing strokes she recognizes from Ava’s letters. It is short and rounded, with soft hearts dotting each i.

_February 16, 1944_

_Dear Mama and Papa,_

> _I know that I shall disappoint you with this letter, but I am afraid that there is no avoiding it. I cannot marry Sergeant Alexander, though he is a fine man and I am sure would make a suitable husband for any fortunate woman he chooses._
> 
> _By the time that you read this, I will already be on my way to the person who has captured my heart, with whom I will spend the rest of my life if I am only so lucky. There is no love purer than ours, no one who could love me the way they could, no one who knows me the way they do. Know that while I deeply regret making you sad and leaving you behind, I will be the happiest I have ever been in my new home, and that as kind and fine as Sergeant Alexander is, I am certain that he could never bring me the same happiness as the bliss into which I am entering. I leave his ring with you to return to him the next that you see him._
> 
> _Though I sadly believe that I will never see either of you again, please know how I love you both and how thankful I am to have been your daughter. My disappearance will bring you shame, but it is not indicative of my wishes for you. And though I know you will never accept my choice, I hope that one day I might bring you pride with the great things that I hope to do, my true love by my side._
> 
> _With all my love, your daughter,_
> 
> _Darcy Carol Lewis Starr_

9.

When the next December falls over New Orleans, Maria and Monica’s house dotted with Christmas lights and holly and the expectant joy of the season, one dark night the sky bursts with energy, the heavens so bright that it wakes Monica up from a dream she cannot place.

A tall figure with brilliant blonde hair and a red, blue, and gold suit treads up the walkway to the front door.

Monica knows what her mother has been watching out the window for these past months, maybe years.

She stands at the window in the living room while Maria meets Carol halfway, throwing her arms around her neck and holding her tight.

Monica smiles.


End file.
